Acquisition
The point at which a website user buying a product, applying for a paid service, purchasing a text-link or ad space etc.

Ad Broker
An internet advertiser who acts as middlemen between web site owners who sell ad space and advertisers who are interested in ads.

AdSense
Google’s contextual based ad serving program among website owners who can enroll in this program and generate usually PPC-based revenue by including text, image and video ads on their webpages. These site-targeted ads are administered by Google which stands for as a giant ad broker between web site owners with advertising space to provide and advertisers.

Ad Space
The space on a Web page available for text, image and other types of advertisements.

Advance Premium
A premium provided to a consumer, on the condition of some later purchase.

Advertising
The placement and purchase of announcements and persuasive messages in time or space in any of the mass media by an advertiser. According to Richards, J. I., and Curran, C. M. (2002) (Oracles on “Advertising”: Searching for a Definition. Journal of Advertising, Summer, 31(2), 63-77), advertising is a paid, mediated, form of communication from an identifiable source, designed to persuade the receiver to take some action, now or in the future.

Advertising Agency
A firm specializing in the creation, design and media placement of advertisements, and in the planning and execution of promotional campaigns.

Advertising budget
Money set aside by the advertiser to pay for advertising.

Adware
Advertising-supported software.

AdWords
Google’s PPC-based advertising product which offers site-targeted text and banner ads at local, regional and international level.

Affiliate Marketing
A revenue sharing and commission-based program between online advertisers (merchants) and online salespeople (affiliate, publisher), whereby compensation is based on performance measures (usually, in the form of clicks, registrations, customers, sales provided through his/her efforts etc).

Affiliate Program
A form of advertising, on the web, that rewards the affiliates (self-selected advertisers) for driving traffic to the advertiser (PPC) or for subsequent transactions (CPA).

Allinlinks
A special search command for Google which searches only within links, not text or title.

Allintext
A special search command for Google which searches only within text of pages, but not in the links or page title.

Allintitle
A special search command for Google which shows only results with terms in title.

Allinurl
A special search command for Google which shows only pages with all terms in the URL.

Alt Attribute (Tag)
A special HTML element within an image tag which provides alternative text when images cannot be displayed. It is recommended to use Alt attribute in each case of an image as alt text is recognizable for many search engines.

Anchor Text
Highlighted word(s) on a page that link to another web page or resource. Also called Link Text, Link Label.

API
Application Programming Interface. It is the interface that gives program developers access to develop programs that work on a particular platform. For instance, for Microsoft’s Windows platform, the API is win32.

Audience
The number of the persons who are exposed to a particular type of advertising campaign.

Autoresponder
An e-mail utility to send an automatic e-mail in response to an incoming e-mail message. First, this allows for the sender to know the e-mail has been received. Second, the receiver can alert people he or she is away on vacation, thus delaying a potential response. 

Backward Link
See backlink

Bait-and-Switch
A technique (considered spam) used in SEO of creating an optimized page and a regular page. The optimized page is submitted to the search engines and replaced with the regular page as soon as the optimized page has been indexed.

Banner Blindness
Refers to a “condition” amongst experienced web users who tend to automatically ignore banner ads. Banner blindness is arguably the main cause of low click-through rates in banner advertising.

Bells-and-Whistles
Advanced features. A web site is said to have too many bells-and-whistles when it contains unnecessary animations etc. In the context of SEO, bells-and-whistles are generally seen as a hinderance since they rarely contribute to high search engine rankings and may even cause a site to rank poorly.

Beta
A testing testing version of a program or a script.

Boolean Search
A Boolean combination of terms allowing the inclusion or exclusion from search results of documents containing certain words. This is achieved through the use of operators such as AND, NOT and OR.

Bibliometric Analysis
See Link Tracking.

Bid
The amount you are willing to pay for keyword ranking on PPC search engines.

Block Level Analysis
A method of analysing a web page’s content on a block-by-block basis, rather than looking at the whole page.

Blog (Web Log)
A site that populated with the site owner’s personal favorites and his/her comments.

Bloptimization
A SEO of a blog.

Brand
A name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good (or service) as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for brand is trademark.

Bridge Page (Bridging Page)
See Doorway Page.

Broadband
Short for: Broad Bandwidth. A high-capacity data transmission channel.

Broken link
See Dead Link.

Browser
A program used to display Internet content.

Browser Compatibility
Referring to the different ways different browsers display the same page.

Bug
An error or glitch in a program or search engine.

Burst
A rapid increase in the popularity of a new topic.

B2C
A business-to-consumer trade.

B2B
A business-to-business trade.

Captcha
A security code (letters, figures or an image)used to prevent spams and automated submissions

Category
A set of web pages of a site of the same topic.

CGI (Common Gateway Interface)
A popular interface between web server software and other programs.

Click Tracking
Tracking user clicks to reveal most and worst popular pages of a website.

Click Through Rate (CTR)
a measure to determine the effectiveness of a link advertisement which represents the percentage of users who click on a link or advertisement.

Cloaking
The practice of delivering content based on the IP address of the client.

Closed Loop
A linking structure where a group of web pages interlink heavily while there are few or no links to or from pages outside the group.

Cluster
Search results grouped together.

Code Bloat
A web page with full of code (scripts, font tags, redundant HTML).

Combined Log File
A log file that tracks visitorson a web site.

Consumer
The ultimate user of goods, ideas or services.

Consumer Satisfaction
The degree to which a consumer’s expectations are fulfilled or surpassed by a product.

Conversion Cost
Total cost per sale, calculated by dividing the total cost of an advertising campaign by the number of resulting sales.

Conversion Point
Conversion points are the points at which your customers have completed a specific action on your web site.

Conversion Rate (CR)
The percentage of site visitors that deliver the most wanted response (MWR).

Cookie
Information stored on a user’s computer by a website.

Cost per click (cost-per-click, CPC)
See CPC.

Counter (page counter)
A text of image code of counting page views, not visitors.

CPA (Cost Per Action)
Similar to CPS.  Also see conversion cost.

CPC (Cost Per Click)
The total cost of an advertising campaign divided by the resulting number of unique visitors.
Sometimes also used as a synonym for PPC.

CPL (Cost Per Lead)
The total cost of an advertising campaign divided by the resulting number of new leads.

CPM
Cost per thousand impressions (M= Roman numeral for 1000). A pricing system often used in the banner advertising industry.

CPS (Cost Per Sale)
Similar to CPA.
Also see conversion cost.

Crawl
What spiders do.

Crawler
See Spider.

Crawler Lag
The delay between the point where a web page is crawled and the point at which it is added to the search engine’s index.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
An add-on to HTML that allows for more accurate control over the way a web page is rendered.

Customer Satisfaction
See Consumer Satisfaction.

Cybersquatting
The practice of buying domains that contain popular trade names or are common misspellings of popular trade names.

C2B
A consumer-to-business (a pricing) model.

C2C
A consumer-to-consumer (an auction-style) model.

Database
An electronic highly organized and categorized set of information.

Dataset
See Index.

Date Range (or limit)
An interval of a time.

Dead Link
A link to a page that no longer exists.
Another word is Broken Link.

Deep Crawl
The action of a spider following links from the domain’s home page deeper into the site until it finds much of the site’s content.

Deep Link
2-nd or deeper-level inner pages of a website. Or, a link to a page deep within a site rather than a link to the home page.

Description Tag
An HTML tag that gives a general description of the contents of the page.

DHTML
Dynamic HTML which gives webmasters increased control over the appearance of a site.

Directory (Web Directory)
A categorized collection of links to the web.

DNS (Domain Name Service, Domain Name Server)
A static, hierarchical name service that makes it easier to remember web site addresses by allowing letters (the domain name) to be used instead of numbers.

DNS parking
Purchased (registered, “parked") domain.

Domain (Domain Name)
A sub-set of internet addresses. Top-level domains are divided into .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .gov and .edu. Apart from these there are also country-specific domain extensions like .ca, .com.au, .co.za, .fr etc. In SEO it is generally accepted that having a keyword-rich domain is beneficial.

Doorway Domain
A keyword-rich domain name that usually consisting of specific keywords or key phrases.

Doorway Page (Bridge Page, Entry Pages and Landing Page)
A page designed to rank well for a selected keyword and redirect visitors to another, “real” page.

Drill Down
The action of clicking on links within a web site or directory, working through categories and sub-categories, in order to find specific information.

Dynamic Content
Web site content generated automatically, usually from a database, and based on user actions (selections).

Dynamic Optimization
The practice of adding fields to a database and page templates (page title, , and meta keywords, meta description, meta autors, meta robots etc). 

Entry Page
See Doorway Page.

EPC (Earnings Per Click)
A unit of measure used to determine a site’s ability to convert visitors into customers. Calculated by dividing total sales amount by total page views.
Also see EPV, ROI, conversion rate.

EPV (Earnings Per Visitor)
A unit of measure used to determine a site’s ability to convert visitors into customers. Calculated by dividing total sales amount by total number of visitors to the site.
Also see EPC, ROI, conversion rate.

Exact Match
A query or search for a documents containing the exact term.

Eye Candy
Aesthetically pleasing web sites. 

Fixed Cost
A costs of a product or service fixed over a number of units or transactions.

Focus group
A method of gathering quantitative data on the preferences and beliefs of consumers through group interaction and discussion usually focused on a specific topic or product.

Font
A typeface style, such as Arial, Times Roman, etc., in a single size.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
A protocol used on the Internet in order to transfer files.

Hidden Text
Text on a web page designed to be visible to spiders but not to human visitors.

Hit
One request for a file on a web server.

Homepage (Home Page, Home)
The main "index" page or navigation hub of a web site.

Hot Linking
The practice of displaying images files, video files etc. on a web site when those files are on another (usually someone else’s) server.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
The primary language used to create web sites.

HTML Optimization
Optimizing and simplifying a HTML code of a webpage for maximum speed while still maintaining the functionality and visual appeal of that page.

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
HTTP is the most common transfer protocol used to facilitate communication between servers and browsers.

Hub
Sites that link to many other sites that are considered authorities in their topic area.

Hyperlink (Links)
Clickable content on a web page usually leads to another page, another site or another part of the same page. 

Inquiry
Consumer response to a company’s advertising or other promotional activities, such as coupons.

Internet
A network of networks, developed in the 1960s as a result of a US defence industry project DARPANET. It encompasses what we now know as E-mail, Usenet Newsgroups, the Web, FTP and Telnet.

Intranet
A network based on the internet TCP/IP open standard.

IP Address
A numerical address of the computer broken into 4 groups of 3 digit numbers lower than 254.

ISP (Internet Service Provider)
An access consumers have to the Internet. 

JavaScript
A comparatively simple scripting language used extensively on the web to, amongst other things, make web pages interactive.

Keyword Density
A measure of the percentage of words on a page that are specifically chosen keywords.

Keyword Domain Name
A domain name that contains keywords.

Keyword Phrase (key phrase)
Two or more words that form a "keyword".

Keyword Purchasing
The practice of buying advertising space on specific SERPs.

Keyword Ratio
See Keyword Density

Keyword Stuffing
Excessive repetition of keywords in an attempt to artificially inflate keyword density and improve a page’s ranking.

Keyword(s) Tag
A meta tag listing keywords associated with the page.

Keyword Targeting
The practice of optimizing certain pages of a web site to rank well in a search for specific keywords.

KISS
Keep It Simple, Stupid. 

Link Label
See Anchor Text.

Link Popularity
A measure of the quantity of a page (usually Homepage) all Inbound Links.

Link Text
See Anchor Text.

Natural Linking
A hypertext links found on web sites that are part of text content and that link to expanded or additional information on a subject without consideration of their value in link popularity.

Net cost
A cost associated with services rendered by an advertising agency excluding the agency commission.

Netscape
An early Internet company, since acquired by AOL.

Netscape Navigator
An early web browser, based on the Mosaic model and developed by the Netscape.

Newsletter
A brief digest of important or noteworthy information.

Nofollow
If you don’t want Googlebot (Goolge’s spider) to follow a link and index it from your site, you can use "rel="nofollow" tag. 

Portal
An entry point webpage for a particular theme. It usually serves as the one-stop-shop starting point to execute all transactions within the theme.

Positioning
SEO to gain high SERP.

Podcasting
Broadcasting audio and video files (MP3) over the internet that has an RSS feed and the content syncs with an audio device. 

Recall
A measure of a search engine’s ability to return all relevant results.

Reciprocal Link (Link Swap)
A link placed on site A, pointing to site B, on the condition that site B returns the favor.

Referrer
When a user follows a link from page A to page B, page A is called the referrer.

Registration
See Submission.

Relevance (Relevancy)
The measure of the accuracy of the search results

Robot
A browser-like program that automatically request web pages in order to index the page content (in the case of spiders) or to retrieve specific information (in the case of programs like e-mail harvesters).

Robot.txt (Robots Text File)
A text file (with the ".txt" extension) that tells spiders which pages it may not index.

ROI
Return On Investment

RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication)
A means of distributing dynamic content (content syndication), using the XML format, to subscribers of that content. 

Query
A keyword, group of keywords or phrase used in a search.

Query Expansion
Search within Results.

Uniques
Short for Unique Visitors.

Unfair advertising
Advertising that is likely to harm the consumer.

Upload
The process of transferring information from a local drive to a server - specifically when that information then becomes accessible via the Internet.

URL (Uniform (Universal ) Resource Locator)
The web address of a web page.

URL submission
See Submission.

URL variableSee Variable.